Game Design Gambits are a horrible addition.

I wanted to bring up something about gambits because I feel like the way they affect builds is being overlooked. And make an argument for why we truly need the ability to re-roll raid gambits and why its pushing people away rather than growing the community. Please just take 3 minutes out of your day and do not prejudge what i wrote.

First of all i want to say that i understand the argument that gambits are supposed to encourage build diversity and make players adapt, but I truly think there is a pretty big downside to how they currently work. When we spend that time farming gear, experimenting with setups, and putting together a build that we enjoy, that build is something we actually want to use when we finally get time to play. Something that is growing to be increasingly impossible to do after the addition to gambits.

The problem with gambits is that they don't just make the raid more difficult. They can completely invalidate certain builds depending on which ones appear that day. Instead of creating an interesting challenge where you adapt your strategy, they just turn into "your build doesn't work here, bring something else."

And the frustrating part is that gambits don't affect all builds equally. Some builds barely care about certain gambits, while others get hit so hard that their entire playstyle falls apart. A player can spend a lot of time creating and improving a build, only for a random daily gambit to make that build basically unusable.

This is where I think gambits end up hurting the game more than helping it. For players with limited time, finally getting a chance to sit down and play a raid is supposed to be the rewarding part. But if they log in after a long day, see the current gambits, and realize that the builds they worked toward are either heavily punished or completely unplayable, they aren't being encouraged to experiment... they're being pushed away from playing that day AT ALL.

A player who only has a few hours available doesn't necessarily have the time to farm a completely different build just because today's gambits happen to counter their current one. They may just decide that it isn't worth logging in if the content they wanted to play is effectively blocked off by random modifiers. Over time, that doesn't encourage people to stay active on the server, it creates frustration and makes people less likely to come back when their limited free time can be wasted by a bad gambit rotation.

I get wanting players to experiment and not just run the same thing forever, but there is a difference between encouraging build diversity and forcing people away from the builds they actually invested in or even playing at all that day. Build diversity should mean that many different builds are viable and fun to play, not that random modifiers decide which builds are allowed to function on a given day. And if your argument is: You Do not have to use them... well lets be honest, we both know how unrewarding raids already are, to make them even more unrewarding you just may as well not play them at all at that point.

 

I read the bit at the bottom, and raids definitely are rewarding as is. There's also four options, so the likelihood all four are bad specifically for your build is pretty low.

So I'll say the response you expected: don't take the gambit

 

The only problem I have with gambits is that I can only grab 3 instead of 4.
I think that other than some very specific class-related issues which they seem to be trying to fix, gambits are the absolute best idea you could have for making raids harder and more rewarding at the same time. It's great that it's a personal thing and not affecting the entire team because it's your own fault for failing.
The only other option would be to have entirely new difficulties for each raid, which they kinda did anyways so I don't see the issue.
I do have issues with the way raids themselves are designed but that's a whole different issue that isn't relevant here.